While the pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth continues, here is another view.
U.S. media coverage of Venezuela tends to center around the country's oil and the—not unrelated—war of words between President Hugo Chávez and the White House. Chávez, for example, likes to refer to George W. Bush as "Mr. Danger," a reference to a brutish foreigner in a classic Venezuelan novel. Somewhat more clumsily, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently compared Chávez to Hitler. While this makes for entertaining copy, reporters have missed a major story in Venezuela—the unprecedented growth of cooperatives that has reshaped the economic lives of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans like Zaida Rosas. On a recent visit to Caracas, we spoke with co-op members and others invested in this novel experiment to open Venezuela's economy from the bottom up.
Explosion of Cooperatives
Our first encounter with Venezuela's co-op movement was with Luis Guacarán, a taxi co-op member who drove us to the outskirts of Caracas. Settled into the rainy trip, we asked Luis what changes wrought by the Chávez government had meant for him personally. Luis replied that he now felt that as a citizen he had a right to share in the nation's oil wealth, which had always gone to an "oligarchy." The people needed health, education, and meaningful work; that was reason enough for Chávez to divert oil revenues in order to provide these things. Two of Luis's five sons are in the military, a daughter is studying petroleum engineering, another has a beauty shop. All were in vocational or professional studies.
Almost everyone we met during our visit was involved in a cooperative. The 1999 constitution requires the state to "promote and protect" co-ops. However, it was only after the passage of the Special Law on Cooperative Associations in 2001 that the totals began to skyrocket. When Chávez took office in 1998 there were 762 legally registered cooperatives with about 20,000 members. In 2001 there were almost 1,000 cooperatives. The number grew to 2,000 in 2002 and to 8,000 by 2003. In mid-2006, the National Superintendence of Cooperatives (SUNACOOP) reported that it had registered over 108,000 co-ops representing over 1.5 million members. Since mid-2003, MINEP has provided free business and self-management training, helped workers turn troubled conventional enterprises into cooperatives, and extended credit for start-ups and buy-outs. The resulting movement has increasingly come to define the "Bolivarian Revolution," the name Chávez has given to his efforts to reshape Venezuela's economic and political structures.
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2006/0706bowmanstone.html
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